David Ottewell: Local election votes mean more to Nick Clegg than AV ‘prize’

Attention, reader: are you idly flicking through this paper looking for something to brighten your day? If so, it is only fair to warn you that this column is largely about the looming council elections.

Attention, reader: are you idly flicking through this paper looking for something to brighten your day?

If so, it is only fair to warn you that this column is largely about the looming council elections.

That’s right, council elections. The anti-Viagra of politics. Even MPs of a certain rank tend to treat them with thinly-concealed disdain. They arrive at the count, shake a few hands, and pretend to take an interest in the rows of council workers, perched behind wonky tables, grimly sorting slips of paper into unimpressive piles.

A glazed look comes into their eyes. They stir instant coffee with already-used spoons. They glance at their watches – surreptitiously at first, later with uncomprehending panic. They ask standard questions of their footsoldiers. Are we still firm in Lower Chubb? How are the revised bin-collection timetables going down on the doorsteps of Glooming West? They nod practised, earnest nods as they pretend to listen to the answers.

So if you want to abandon this column now, feel free. But know this: this year, those MPs might be paying a bit more attention. This year, the results might just have significant consequences for the coalition.

There are two votes on May 5: the referendum on whether to replace our first-past-the-post system with the Alternative Vote, and the council poll.

It is the first which has captured the national media’s attention, if not that of the public. It has been said – and unconvincingly denied – that the referendum was the price of Nick Clegg entering a coalition which has largely implemented Conservative policies.

The theory is simple: Mr Clegg has gambled that the British public will vote ‘yes’, and that AV will guarantee future gains for his party. These gains, the theory goes, outweigh any short-term losses caused by the Lib Dems’ apparent u-turns on touchstone issues like university tuition fees. The theory casts Mr Clegg as a noble martyr, willing to sacrifice his political reputation to secure a long-term future for his party.

But it does the deputy prime minister both too much, and too little, credit. Too much, because he simply hasn’t shown the strategic insight the theory implies. Bluntly, he has been tactically outmanoeuvred by David Cameron. He failed to predict the anger caused by the tuition-fee hike. He allowed one of his party’s few big-hitters – Vince Cable – to be put directly in the firing line. He has toed the coalition line on council cuts, which have unfairly penalised cities in the north where the Lib Dems have made so much progress against Labour in recent years.

If Mr Clegg really were some strategic genius, willing to lose the battle to win the war, he would at least have limited the collateral damage.

Too little credit, too, because the theory assumes Mr Clegg is a cold-blooded calculator. He isn’t. He genuinely believes in the Lib Dem creed. He genuinely wants to make voters’ lives better. His weakness is not a lack of principle. It is a failure to best use the limited political leverage of coalition to put principle into action.

So the theory is flawed. Yet with his party nose-diving in the polls, Mr Clegg himself seems tempted to embrace it. In an astonishing interview last week, he denied that he and Mr Cameron were ‘mates’ and told how his nine-year-old child asked him ‘why the students were angry at him’.

This was the Lib Dem leader painting himself as the doomed, tragic hero of the sixth-former’s imagination – right down to his admission that he ‘regularly’ cried to music.

Mr Clegg wasn’t talking like this a few months ago. Then he was bullish about the coalition, and his party’s role in shaping its policies. If he now has doubts, it isn’t the culmination of some political masterplan. It is the realisation he has got things wrong.

For Mr Clegg did not want AV at any cost. He thought he could have his cake and eat it.

In any case, would the gamble have been worth it? There is no guarantee the British public will vote for AV. The polls are on a knife-edge. The effect the new system would have can be easily overstated. It would not compensate for the loss of a few points in the Lib Dems’ share of the national vote, for example. If a general election were held tomorrow, the polls suggest, the party would get wiped out – with or without AV.

And what of the long term? The Conservatives learned the hard way that trust, once lost, takes a awfully long time to restore. Even now, in Manchester, the Tories find it impossible to win a council seat. At least they always had the comfort of a core vote in other, leafier, parts of the country. Do the Lib Dems have the same? Can they afford to write off a loss of trust in the north?

The extent of the damage will become clear on May 5. If the Lib Dems can limit Labour’s gains – and their own losses – then perhaps Mr Clegg can put some cheerier tunes on his iPod. If not, he might as well lock himself in his room with a bottle of whiskey and Wagner’s Ring cycle.

For the Lib Dems, then, the vote that really matters on May 5 isn’t the referendum on AV. It is those council elections – dull, unglamorous and yet so very, very important.